District 9

Every now and then, a film comes along that both defies and compels description. "District 9" is one such movie: a science-fiction action vehicle so brilliantly and fully imagined that real life, when it resumes after the credits, arrives with a new sense of dread.

You may well believe that a huge alien mother ship has been hovering over Johannesburg for the past 20 years. You'll feel sick in your gut at the events that occurred there. Revealing much more of the plot, at this point, would ruin the sucker-punch force of its storytelling, but people who can't stomach violence should keep their distance; be advised that heads explode, limbs detach and bodies go sploosh in an instant.

The trailer for "District 9."

Media: San Francisco Chronicle

With that warning aside, this is categorically one of the best releases of the year - a spellbinding genre flick that's also a corrosive assault on the baroque inhumanity of common human beings.

Directed and co-written by Neill Blomkamp and produced by "Lord of the Rings" lord Peter Jackson, "District 9" opens with a documentary-style recap of the aliens' mysterious arrival in South Africa and their systematic placement in shantytowns that echo apartheid.

The aliens are bipedal, exoskeletal and vaguely crustacean, with lobster claws that snap from their midriffs and tentacular, writhing mouths. South Africans call them "prawns." They speak in gurgling clicks - subtitled for our convenience, but understood perfectly well by the humans who've been oppressing them for two decades.

We meet one such oppressor early on, a smiling drone named Wikus Van De Merwe (an impressive, Steve Carell-ish Sharlto Copley, hereby launched into a huge career) who's responsible for moving all 1.8 million aliens into a new encampment hundreds of kilometers outside Johannesburg.

As talking heads comment ominously on the events that unfolded, shaky-cam footage tracks Wikus' door-to-door interaction with the clacking, recalcitrant prawns. Two of them, a father and son, become vitally important to the story. So does Wikus.

"District 9" deftly weaves the faux-documentary gimmick with more forthright narrative segments and all-out, upscale action mayhem and is unlike any other human-versus-extraterrestrial film in recent memory. I simply refuse to spoil it for you. It's that good.

Bloody, suspenseful, excoriating and flecked through with pathos and humor, "District 9" is science fiction at its killer, chiller best.